The present invention is in the field of telephony communication as it pertains to mobile devices or units operating on a private network and pertains more particularly to methods and apparatus for enhancing communication capability, data transfer capability, and increasing the number of mobile devices that can successfully operate on a communication-center facilitated virtual private network (VPN).
The field of telephony communication has grown more diverse and flexible. Call-in centers that once were restricted to connection-oriented switched telephony (COST) are now employing computer-simulated telephony techniques generally referred to as data network telephony (DNT). Call-in centers that are enhanced with DNT and multimedia capability more appropriately termed communication centers in the art. This is due to the broad range of telephony and data transfer capabilities that are routinely practiced within or facilitated by such centers.
Communication centers are often used by enterprises to accomplish cellular communication links with fleets of vehicles having wireless communication devices installed therein for receiving instruction and responding back to personnel operating within the center, such as dispatchers, sales agents and so on. There are a variety of existing techniques used by communication centers today to track, control and support fleets of vehicles.
Services such as Omnitracs(trademark) operated by Qualcomm and On-Star(trademark) operated by General Motors Corp. (GM) use the well-known cellular telephone infrastructure and the global positioning system (GPS) to track and support vehicles in the field. Services offered include such as air bag deployment notification, remote door unlocking, road-side service, vehicle theft notification, and so on. In some cases device-equipped vehicles are owned and operated by a single entity that also provides the service. In some cases vehicles are owned individually, or in small groups and are subscribed to a service.
A commonality among all of these types of service communication systems is that users (i.e. drivers of subscribed vehicles) may need to be periodically tracked by the system to be given logistics support, help or advice at some point during a trip. In some cases tracking is employed for reporting purposes to customers of the service business, such as with some trucking companies and the like. The above-described systems target mostly high-end vehicles or commercial fleets as primary targets, due to the higher value and traffic they incur.
One problem with the infrastructure associated with the above-described services is that communication with the volume of serviced cars or commercial fleet of vehicles is typically implemented by a single communication center. As a result the systems are limited to a relatively small volume vehicles depending on the nature of the service. Such a communication center, as is known in the art, simply cannot handle a really large volume, such as perhaps a million vehicles or more.
The technologies (GPS and cellular services) that support the above-described services are continually being developed and made available over ever-increasing geographic regions. Therefore, it is desirable to provide similar services to a much larger customer base than the currently limited numbers serviced by today""s largest system/infrastructures. As previously described, a single communications center cannot handle the desired volume. For example, a service base of a million users or more would logically encompass mostly xe2x80x9cnormal citizensxe2x80x9d rather than professional drivers due to shear volume. In this regard, services offered would have to be more diversified among users instead of being standardized as with a fleet of company-owned service vehicles. An unacceptable communication load would result in any single communication center. Moreover, other problems would arise from an overload of users interacting with a center such as increased costs of long-distance routing, and lack of xe2x80x9clocal knowledgexe2x80x9d required to effect many desired and marketable services.
What is clearly needed is a method and apparatus that enables efficient data management and routing of service events to and from a large volume of tracked vehicles maintaining wireless communication devices, wherein specific interaction and routing does not have to be performed in or facilitated by one single communication center. Such a system would allow a single service to provide cost-effective, mainstream services to millions subscribers.
In a preferred embodiment of the present invention a service communication system for mobile vehicles is provided, comprising a cellular interface in individual ones of the mobile vehicles, for establishing telephony events over a cellular network with a base station; a global positioning system in individual ones of the mobile vehicles for determining global position from transmissions from GPS satellites; a network of base stations for receiving and broadcasting to the mobile vehicles, and for bridging events between cellular and public switched telephone service (PSTN) protocol; a network-level routing system connected by first telephony trunks to the base stations and enabled to retrieve GPS position from the telephony events, and a plurality of service centers connected to the network-level routing system by second telephony trunks. The network-level routing system determines a destination for individual ones of the telephony events among the plurality of service centers according to the retrieved GPS position.
In preferred embodiments the network-level routing system further comprises an interactive voice solution (IVS) system for providing synthesized voice responses to incoming events. Also in preferred embodiments individual ones of the service centers each comprise a telephone switching apparatus connected by a computer telephony integration (CTI) link to a CTI processor for monitoring a controlling the connected telephone switching apparatus, and the network routing center comprises a network-level CTI processor connected to a network-level switch, and wherein the CTI processors at network and service center level are interconnected by a data link separate from the second telephony trunks. In some embodiments data about a call event is stripped at the network-level routing system and transmitted by the data link separate from the second telephony trunks to a service center to which the call event is routed.
In various embodiments of the invention taught in enabling detail below, services for mobile vehicles may for the first time be provided in a specialized way by having local service centers attuned to the needs of certain areas and for special purposes, and by routing service call events to specialized centers based on mobile vehicle location at the time service is requested.